Anchorage Assembly Votes Against Special Counsel To Investigate Election Fraud

Even though the anti-gay Christian hate group running the No On 5 campaign acknowledges that they wrongly told residents they could vote on the same day they registered, the Anchorage Assembly has decided against assigning a special investigator to look into election fraud regarding last week's vote on LGBT rights.

The Anchorage Assembly rejected a resolution on a 7-4 vote Tuesday night to appoint a special counsel to investigate irregularities and ballot shortages during last week's city elections. One of the speakers in favor of the special counsel at the Assembly meeting was ACLU of Alaska Executive Director Jeffrey Mittman, who announced at a press conference earlier Tuesday that the group believes the ballot shortages denied some city residents their constitutional right to vote.

The clerk's office, which runs the elections, has said that 53 of 121 precincts at least temporarily ran short on ballots, based on a preliminary review. The shortages frustrated voters who drove from polling place to polling place in search of a way to choose their mayor and pick sides in the fractious gay rights debate. One Assembly member said during a break that the election irregularities may have been severe enough to justify a redo. "That's my gut feeling," said Harriet Drummond, who chairs the Assembly elections and ethics committee. She said she's also heard of problems with improperly addressed absentee ballots as well as the ballot shortage.

"This was a stunning defeat, because the homosexual agenda organizations thought that they were going to have this as an agenda that would just simply roll through Anchorage, perhaps through Alaska, and then push this across the country," he explains. "They were stopped dead in their tracks."Religious organizations and churches in the area rallied in opposition to Proposition 5 and were successful in turning out voters. "This is a great celebration for the family," Staver asserts. "It's a great victory for those of us who believe that we should not elevate sexual behavior to a protected status like race."